Dear list members,
 
Here is the full programme of the forthcoming MMP, University of Salford seminar series:
 
  

MMP SEMINAR SERIES







All sessions 4-15-5.30

Location: second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House, The Crescent, Salford

19 October: Dr Toni Sant: Preserving a History of the Future: Archiving the Avant-Garde in a Digital Environment at Franklin Furnace
Established since 1976, Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York-based arts organization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists - particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content.
Drawing on his book Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A
History of the Future (Intellect, 2010), Toni Sant discusses how new
technology raises new issues in regard to preservation and archiving for
Franklin Furnace. Aside from the issues that arise during the creation and
primary dissemination of works on the Internet, long-term distribution
arrangements and digital-rights management are relevant for making the art and its documentation available on demand as part of a long-term plan for
preservation and dissemination. Identifying the best preservation strategies
is the first step, but there are also intellectual-property matters to
consider. Such issues have become major concerns for Franklin Furnace since
the late 1990s and it has not only braced itself to tackle them but also
pushed itself into the frontline of finding solutions for them, along with
others who have similar concerns.







2 November: Dr Felicity Colman: How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media
Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image" and "Cinema 2: The Time-Image". Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze's writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This cine-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. In this talk I'll look at some of the key concepts behind Deleuze's revolutionary theory of the cinema (affect, time, thought, politics, etc), and discuss how Deleuze's radical methodology is useful for all forms of for screen media analysis.







16 November: Dr Eithne Quinn: Taking the Rap: The Use of Violent Grime Lyrics in Criminal Cases
In three recent murder cases in London, prosecution counsels presented violent 'grime' rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. As author of a scholarly book on gangsta rap, Eithne Quinn acted as an expert witness for the defence in the three trials. This paper gives an account of the legal use of violent rap and argues that, in these cases, lyrics should not be admissible as evidence.




30 November: Professor Brian Ward: "The 'C' is For Christ": The Beatles, Arthur Unger and Datebook Magazine
While much has been written on the "more popular than Jesus" controversy which engulfed the Beatles in 1966 during their final US tour, little attention has been paid to Arthur Unger, the man whose decision to re-print an English interview with John Lennon in his magazine Datebook sparked the furore. This talk explains that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Datebook was not a typical teen magazine, but a vehicle for the progressive politics of its publisher-editor Unger who had been using it for years to expose various kinds of intolerance and bigotry to American teens. Moreover, the Beatles had known Unger and supported his magazine's covert politics long before 1966. Indeed, far from cynically ripping Lennon's quote on religion-and an equally important one from Paul McCartney on racism-out of context and without permission to make a quick profit, it was the band's own management which initially encouraged Unger to use the interviews. Ultimately, the argument here is that it is impossible to understand impossible to understand the genesis, evolution, or cultural significance of the "Jesus" controversy without attention to Unger.




14 December: Dr Andrew Burke The Sound of Straight-to-Video: VHS Head's Trademark Ribbons of Gold

Comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of 80s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop, the tracks on VHS Head's debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold trace a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force and menace. The work of VHS Head does not simply represent another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for dead media and obsolete technologies, but also serves as a model for how the recent past resides in the present day: as a discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that continue to haunt and unsettle the present. Drawing on memory studies and thing theory, this paper examines the uncanny as it is embodied in the ungainly material form of the videocassette and let loose through the music of VHS Head. 










18 January: Dr Xavier Mendik: The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust A Documentary Screening and Discussion 

In 1979, Italian director Ruggero Deodato created Cannibal Holocaust, a film that was to revolutionise and scandalise the nature of realist horror cinema. Deodato's influential and infamous tale centres on four intrepid documentary filmmakers who go missing in the Amazonian wilderness, leading to fears that they have been butchered by local 'savages.' However, when the famous NYU anthropologist Harold Monroe discovers the group's final filmed diary, a far more shocking tale emerges...To tie in with this newly restored, high definition release of the film, Xavier Mendik will be discussing the long road back from hell for one of cinema's most contentious titles. The seminar includes a screening of his new documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust, which is included on the new Shameless Films Blu-ray and DVD release of the film. The documentary charts the film's controversial history, as well as its even more confrontational use of realist techniques, whilst also assessing its socio-cultural context in relation to Italy's turbulent 'Years of Lead'. 







1 February: Prof Jackie Stacey: The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown
Across the humanities and social sciences we are currently witnessing a move towards a renewed cosmopolitanism. In these debates, cosmopolitan ideals blend a liberal notion of 'openness to others' with a sense of 'worldliness' that might welcome the flow of diversity and proximity to the unfamiliar. This talk questions the celebratory tone of this renewed cosmopolitanism through a reading of Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000). If the promise of the cosmopolitan project is to be found in the notion of what we might call a more 'open sociality', then this talk explores how Code Unknown turns the processes of spectatorship into the ethical testing ground for such a vision.







15 February: Professor Mark Wheeler: The Democratic worth of Celebrity Politics in an era of Late Modernity

As there has been an exponential increase in celebrity political interventions a debate has emerged about the worth of celebrity and democracy. In post-democratic societies, Henrik Bang and John Keanes' respective constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy have placed an emphasis on the importance of 'involvement', 'voice' and 'output' in terms of political representation, and provide an ideological framework through which to capture the value of celebrity politicians. Subsequently, it may be argued that Barack Obama utilised a form of 'liquid' celebrity in his 2008 United States (US) Presidential campaign to reconnect with a disenfranchised American electorate. However, this article contends that it remains necessary to consider how far celebrity politicians have 'inputed' aggregated forms of 'agency' to affect political outcomes. From these differing perspectives, it seeks to define a normative position concerning the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity.







29 February: Dr Sian Barber: Reading the BBFC archive: Film Censorship in the 1970s
This seminar will draw upon work recently undertaken at the British Board of Film Classification to explore film censorship in Britain in the 1970s. My examination of over 250 files offers new evidence about the operation and implementation of active film censorship in this period. Yet what can these individual files tell us about standards of permission and popular taste in a given period? And how can this material be used to further debates about film and censorship? The BBFC files provide a wealth of unused material which reveals the operation, history and development of a crucial and often secretive part of the British film industry which deserves critical attention. Yet the BBFC itself is uncertain how best to present its material to researchers and is concerned about the way in which such material may be used and how it reflects upon them as an organisation. This talk will consider the ethical and practical issues of 'reading' this archive and how these challenges can be addressed to provide new insights into British film censorship, both historic and modern.







14 March: Owen Hatherley: Britpop vs Class Consciousness - the case of Pulp

Though it is doubtful that actual musicians ever saw it that way, the welfare state and British pop music were mutually dependent phenomena, and both died around the same time. This talk will consider how this starts to come to consciousness in the work of Pulp, an arguable final member of the art school pop lineage, who brought to the surface the largely suppressed class politics of the poujadist 90s pop movement known as Britpop.





28 March:Dr Rachel Moore: Tesseract: The beginning of the end.
Digital Media have forced us to look again at what distinguishes photography from film as well as the values we attach to them. This paper goes back to photography's origins to re-evaluate 'the instant' drawing on Hollis Frampton's recently republished theoretical work.







May 9: Professor Martine Beugnet Encoding Loss: Corporeality and (Im)materiality in the Age of the Digital

Focusing on film-based works by contemporary French film-makers and multimedia artists (De Van, Calle, Akerman amongst others), this talk explores tropes that are associated with interrogations or anxieties about the seemingly dematerialising power of contemporary, technology-driven modes of existence, in particular where the female body is concerned. I look at the conscious or implicit responses that these works offer to the growing sense of immateriality arguably endemic to the age of digital encoding and - to paraphrase Baudrillard's classic quote - 'superfluous' bodies. 







May 23: Dr Christopher Weedman: British Cinema and Modernity: Losey, Pinter, Bogarde




June 6: 

Dr Andy Robinson: Time and Dialogism in Deleuzian Theory 

This paper will examine the Deleuzian theory of time, developed in Deleuze's books on Bergson and Cinema, with a focus on the themes of dialogue and the Event. It will begin by summarising Deleuze's concepts of past, present and future. It will explain how each perspective is differentiated as a sensorimotor zone constructed through attention to life, providing a particular zone of resonance unique to each person. It will also explain how Deleuze proposes to understand possibilities for dialogue between such zones through the Bergsonian idea of intuition. It will also discuss how the event is seen to interrupt monological sequences of time. Finally, it will explore the idea of "absolute deterritorialisation" and the relevance of Deleuze's theory of time for social transformation.

 
Dr Michael Goddard
Lecturer in Media Studies
School of Media, Music and Performance
University of Salford
Adelphi Building
Peru St
Salford M3 6EQ
 
Reviews Editor of Studies in East European Cinema (SEEC)
Member of the Publications Committee of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS)
Author of Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism and the Subversion of Form, Purdue, 2010
Co-Editor with Dr Benjamin Halligan of Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ashgate, 2010

 

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